


On Michael Gold: Grief, Relationships, and Sexuality

by AnnetheCatDetective



Category: The Big Chill (1983)
Genre: Depression, Essays, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Meta, Nonfiction, Other, Queerness During the 80s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-09-13 11:11:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16891479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/pseuds/AnnetheCatDetective
Summary: I wrote a fairly slapdash essay about Michael's feelings, sexual identity, relationships, and motivations, after a group watch of 'The Big Chill', and I've gone back and made something proper out of it.This essay proposes that Michael was in love with the late Alex, and dives into the complicated relationships he has with grief/loss/death, with sex-- not only his own sexuality, but also the many reasons one might have for seeking sex outside of sexual desire-- and with the people he cares about.I don't deal very heavily with the way that Alex died, here, only with the gaps he leaves and the effect on Michael. I'm sure it's worth exploring how this is different, for better and for worse, than an accident might have been, or death at someone else's hands, but... it's a hard one to grapple with and any exploration of how method-of-death affects Michael specifically would involve even wilder headcanoning and speculation...





	On Michael Gold: Grief, Relationships, and Sexuality

I had promised after the group watch that I would actually write this essay up with everything fresh in my mind, so basically this is where I will be exploring Michael’s sexuality, his feelings for Alex, how he handles grief, and also his outsider status within his college friend group. I will also be referring to a couple of deleted scenes which give some more depth to Michael’s character and his history with loss.

 

Michael Gold, a young thirty-something in 1983, started college with the other characters in the late 60s (there’s a reference to the March on Washington, which would have been… way too early, like, there are a couple moments where I feel like Kasdan just doesn’t understand math? I have to assume Michael is older than Goldblum by a couple years for any of it to work at all but even so-- but I digress). Everyone is grappling with both the recent death of their friend Alex, and also how to be an adult in the real world when you grew up saying ‘don’t trust anyone over thirty’– and the fact that they’ve by and large become people their youthful selves would have hated.

 

We first see Michael during the opening montage of everyone in the wake of Alex’ suicide– getting the news, heading to the funeral, etc, and in Michael’s case, just getting very frustrated over not being able to find something in his desk, the first instance of his grief coming out as frustration/anger. He tends to display either frustration or flippancy, but there are a few moments where his face is just… openly heartbroken, even when he’s attempting to express anything else.

 

At the funeral, in a cut scene, both Harold and Karen fail to recognize Michael (I’ll give Harold a pass– stills from the cut flashback show Michael had an… impressive beard back in their college days, and Harold sees him in his car, so the fact that he’s fuckin’ six foot four isn’t a factor in recognizing him. I’m sure everyone was looking at old group photos and had the beard in mind, and Harold seems genuinely happy to see him, goes for a hug. Karen he walks right up to, talks to, and she’s just ???), and he’s so primed for rejection that even when Sam initiates a hug, Michael introduces himself.

 

The first instance of his face just folding in on itself in grief is when he says he wants to see Alex before the casket is closed up, but when faced with the body, frustration is at the forefront again. Facing this loss is clearly difficult for him, and though later at the wake he jokes around with Sarah and the others, talks about unrelated subjects, throughout the funeral scenes, both cut and in the final product, Michael displays a lot of emotion. Sometimes it’s clear that he’s schooling his expression into the ‘correct’ emotion or level of emotion, but when he’s faced first with the thought of seeing Alex one last time, there is something subtle yet so raw, writ large across his face. And when he does see him, when he’s confronted with the reality of how he died and what it’s like to see him this way, it’s too much to contain. Anger, disgust-- but the root of both of those things is his grief, his guilt, and his relationship to death and loss.

 

I will be honest, I first threw out ‘what if Michael was in love with Alex’ as a random thought, looking for a hook for giving Michael something to be in pain over for a fic that took him out of the setting of the film itself, but sitting down and watching the movie all at once, start to finish, I was surprised at how well it fit. Again, I’m turning to the same cut scene, but when Michael goes to talk to Alex’ parents, he names Alex taking him home to their house as being some of his best memories. Alex’ parents, of course, fail to recognize Michael, and he seems MORE hurt by that than by Karen not recognizing him. Sure, it’s building on top of the previous moments, but between the incidents with Karen and with the Marshalls, he’d had Sam go in for the hug and know exactly who he was. Like, as much as he built his friends up in his head over the years, he also clearly has a place in his heart for Alex’ parents, and it’s not really reciprocated. Another cut scene reveals that both of Michael’s parents are dead, making him the only character we know has dealt with loss and grief before Alex-- Michael has grieved before, long enough ago that he is able to speak flippantly about that loss. Death is something Michael is not divorced from, it’s something he knows. The film doesn’t tell us when or how he lost them, we are free to fill in the blanks however we wish, but that moment tells us that Michael has suffered before-- either he has suffered loss twice, or he has suffered one truly _enormous_ loss. The depth of his grief and the way that he displays it, too, is affected by his history with losing those close to him.

 

Going back to what made it to screen, as they go from the viewing to the funeral itself, Harold introduces Michael to Alex’ girlfriend, Chloe. She is very young and has a thing for damaged men, and while she’s certainly also grieving, there’s very much the sense that this relationship wasn’t… like, IT for her? It feels like she liked Alex and liked being with him, but it wasn’t Love. While Michael spends some of the weekend pursuing her, the initial meeting ISN’T attraction. He’s surprised to learn Chloe exists, and honestly seems a little huffy about her at first, or at the idea that there was someone important in Alex’ life that he was never told about. There’s some off-and-on in how he engages with her. He warms up over the funeral, moves into being quasi-flirtatious and then just flirtatious, but also seems put off by her at a couple points. He’s not pleased in the moments where it seems as if she doesn’t care _enough_ about Alex. He has a moment in reacting to her saying she always wanted to ride in a limo, though it doesn’t stop his pursuing her, and there’s another moment where she mentions having had sex with Alex the night before he killed himself where the way he’s thrown and the expression that crosses his face is more than the others, who roll with it and make jokes. Despite using humor himself in dealing with grief, in that moment Michael doesn’t engage with the others through humor. While the other guys laugh a bit, joke about what a way to go out, Michael looks a little lost, a little sad-- or a little hurt. He does not know Chloe well enough to be hurt by her, nor would it be reasonable to feel that way over the relationship she had, when he wouldn’t have met her otherwise.

 

Despite the fact that he’s ostensibly trying to sleep with her, he doesn’t really leer at her– he looks at her much less sexually than the camera does, even when she’s in her underwear. His flirtation is playful, and while she doesn’t go for him and later rebuffs an invitation to dance, he does draw her out of her shell and make her smile when they’re sitting on the floor together, which is not a bad thing however it’s accomplished. The two of them are more on the outside– Michael is continuously on the fringes of the group, pushed away by the people he clearly still cares about, and no one really makes much of an effort to reach out to Chloe. Karen talks to her once and never again, Harold and Sarah are the only ones who know her at all, but are so busy with hosting that they can’t and don’t give her much attention. Also, side note, Nick talks about how disgusting it is for Michael to pursue Chloe ‘while Alex is still warm’, but he winds up with her not much later, in fact drugs his friend in order to be the only one talking to her, AND she reveals she’d called into his radio show when she was fifteen and that doesn’t put him off? But the ‘while Alex is still warm’ may be the POINT of it for Michael, who is entirely connecting to her as two people in mourning who could use the comfort, but also, like… forgive me for reaching, but as a way of having that intimacy with Alex. Chloe is the one person there that Michael knows remembers Alex as a lover rather than a friend-- unless he’s aware of the affair with Sarah, but given the way Sarah doesn’t seem to like him or want him around, an unexplained personal disdain, Chloe is the only one who will talk to Michael about Alex-the-lover.

 

I think it’s also worth mentioning that we’re never given any reason for Sarah’s apparent disgust and dislike. They have moments where they interact the same as any other two friends in the group, and Michael is never anything but kind and understanding and jokingly flirtatious with her, but overall she doesn’t want Michael specifically in her house. As mentioned later, she accuses him of mercenary motives in coming to the funeral, though with Alex living in her home she might not be unaware that Michael has tried to be in contact with him. What we do see of Michael discussing investments is mostly his telling Sam that he’s most of the way there, and being _surprised_ by Sam’s offer to talk more about it later with an eye to investing-- a far cry from Sarah’s accusation. She disparages Michael with Meg, after Michael puts in a bid with her-- and more on Michael’s side of that later, but Meg specifically wants a man to get her pregnant. She doesn’t want romance, or didn’t, up until Michael was not sufficiently romantic. It’s fair for Meg to not want to sleep with Michael specifically based on their own history, but it’s not fair for her to come up with reasons after the fact that Michael is unsuitable which directly contradict what she’d previously said she wanted and didn’t want. Sarah is quick to jump on Michael as undesirable and emotionally clumsy. We’re never told that something came between them since their college years. I’m not really here to speculate about Sarah and her reasoning-- we know she doesn’t make sound decisions, honestly. Just to point out the conditions Michael is dealing with when it comes to how the people he still loves despite the long separation feel about him.

 

His pursuit of Meg is also _not_ about his desire to have sex with her, but about the fact that she’d gone to both Nick and Sam and not to him (and that they’d had something back in the day, but like, everyone in this friend group slept with or tried to sleep with everyone, honestly). It’s based not in any personal desire, but in wanting to be included with the group, and beginning to sense that he’s not, picking up on the others freezing him out. Sarah goes so far as to suggest– though not to his face– that he came down not for Alex but to drum up investors for a venture he was never really going to follow through on. He talks to Sam about manipulation and honesty in the pursuit of sex, in one of the videotape bits, and about his approach, and at one point talks about how everything people do is just an attempt to get laid, and yet in that discussion with Sam, he also downplays the importance of sex to him– and his motivation even for seeking sex is so non-sexual. It seems to be about comfort and belonging, any leering is playful and performative.

 

Honestly he feels like a Kinsey five and a half who’s overcompensating because otherwise he has to deal with his feelings and his sexuality, and that’s difficult to do because Alex has just killed himself after cutting off contact, and also it’s fucking 1983 and it’s a bad time to not be straight. It’s worth noting that his self-described seduction style might not be successful with women-- and being successful with women is less the point than being seen in pursuit, perhaps-- but is the kind of directness that would have gotten better results with other men. Whether or not Michael ever actively pursued other men… that’s less the point.

 

Nick and Harold do discuss Michael having a girlfriend, when he’s drawing Chloe out of her shell, which falls in line with the fact that we see Michael with a woman early on, and yet at no point does he behave like a man with a girlfriend. Annie may be a beard, a friend with benefits, an ex he’s close with, but Michael doesn’t mention her as a lover. Meg doesn’t raise the question of her when she comes up with reasons not to sleep with him. Despite her being named as a romantic partner by others, and being someone close enough to Michael to comfort him before he leaves for the funeral, she may not be a serious romantic partner. Karen brings her husband to the funeral, though he doesn’t stay for the weekend, but Annie doesn’t accompany Michael, nor does he think about her or even rationalize her away on-screen himself. Michael is not otherwise presented as a thoughtless person-- he’s shown to center the feelings of others above his own, and he’s shown to worry about his place in the lives of others. Even with the rampant sex-seeking and infidelity that sweeps through the group over the weekend, it doesn’t fit with the rest of his character to throw a serious romantic partner out the window without another thought. Michael wants to be loved, needed, included-- that doesn’t mean he would never cheat on a partner on an away weekend, however, that he never displays any insecurity or regret over her not going with him to the funeral, that he never mentions her himself even in the moments when he is most in need of the belief that someone still loves him, suggests that her place in his life is not that of a serious romantic partner.

 

This brings us to a key moment regarding Michael’s need for belonging and relationships with others, as everyone is talking about whether they should have done more and whether any of them, Harold and Sarah and Chloe aside, even spoke to Alex in the last five, ten years, Michael, VISIBLY upset, says that he called often, that Alex had pushed him away– now, no scenes suggest that Michael repeatedly reached out to anyone else in those years. Even Meg, who would have been geographically convenient and who we know he’s slept with before, we don’t know when last they even spoke before this. He reached out to _Alex_. And Alex could be around Harold and Sarah, with them not seeing the state he was in, but had to push Michael away, and that says something about who he was truly emotionally close to and who he felt he needed to distance himself from when in the grips of depression. Who he couldn’t hide from.

 

In spite of his being just, again, folding in on himself in grief throughout this discussion, Michael is consistently trying to reassure the others, and they never do the same for him. Nick-- the one who studied psych, by the way, and spent time as a radio therapist-- is an ass to him over the very idea of friendship and helping people through their problems. Even when the others argue Nick down, it’s not in Michael’s defense, and Michael is sitting here suffering in silence and doing his best to cheer up everyone else. There’s some really beautiful subtle acting, in these moments of his face falling before he can make himself put up a facade. Just a sad boy with his carton of ice cream, holding out the broken pieces of his heart to people who have forgotten how to care for him.

 

Harold gives over the place he’d had for Alex and Chloe to Nick, who he views as the friend who is next most in need of his Dad skills, and who has taken up Alex’ place with Chloe as well. While he’s poking through Alex’ stuff in the run-down guest house, Nick finds an article Michael wrote twelve years or so ago, about Alex’ refusal of a fellowship. We don’t see much of it, but in this case the tone seems to be laudatory in regards to Alex’ being his own man, unlike the incident between Michael and Sam over a review he’d written of Sam’s TV show. The group suggests that Alex had been upset with Michael over the article, but you don’t keep an article your friend wrote about you for twelve years because you’re mad about it. While it’s suggested that this was something that might have come between them in a small way, that’s not the feeling I get-- not from the article, not from the fact that Alex kept it throughout all the many moves he made over the years (it’s important to note he’s been all over the place, and the article is in very good condition for moving around the country a dozen years, it clearly meant something to Alex to keep it), and definitely not from Michael’s reaction. He doesn’t seem to believe for a moment that Alex was mad at him, he seems touched to discover that he had the article still. He might have been embarrassed to be the focus of it, as stands to reason-- Alex’ decision not to take the fellowship or pursue a career in physics was a bone of contention between him and his advisers, professors, probably his parents, and even some of his friends probably never really understood why. But however he felt about the attention to his decision, Michael wrote the article from Alex’ side of things, tried to understand and defend Alex’ position, and it’s no surprise that such a thing would be important to him. It’s some surprise to Michael, and again, some beautiful acting just in the way the emotion moves over his face in such a brief moment out of the movie, but when all is said and done and his emotions are processed, I think it’s a welcome surprise.

 

Michael Gold is repeatedly pushed out or frozen out– no one engages with him during the group dance, where he carries on in spite of that rejection and keeps up a brave face. He’s brushed off during group discussions. Sam is the only one who really engages with him without brushing him off– and Harold, a little, when they’re one on one, but Harold is playing host and is kind of the Dad Friend, and his energy is elsewhere. As previously mentioned, he sees Nick as needing him more, despite the fact that Michael is also in upheaval and needs support he’s not getting. And YET, in spite of slowly coming to see that his friends don’t love him the way he’s continued to love them over all the years apart, Michael is the one who delivers the ‘we’re never leaving’ line, who continues to reach for and need these people who have hurt him. He doesn’t know how to be an adult without them, he doesn’t like the person he has been without them-- he can’t go back again, but he can’t move forward, either, without losing something precious to him. And while the others all make plans to stay in touch with each other, the way they address each other and angle themselves pushes him out, but here he is, still longing to be a part of this group, because it was the last place he was happy, because only they remember Alex, and because he is not ready to let go, of him or of the group.

**Author's Note:**

> Please always talk to me about my precious son Michael Gold.


End file.
